Developers and publishers always set out to make their projects as ambitious as possible, and procedurally generated worlds can indeed turn a game into a masterpiece if done correctly, allowing players to never experience the same moment twice.

BioWare’s Lead Designer Ian Frazier revealed in a recent interview with IBTimes UK that they initially set out to develop Mass Effect Andromeda’s world as a procedurally generated universe. However, the studio decided to ditch the idea as it took away from the game’s narrative nature.

We were looking at a game that used a lot more procedural tools to have a vast swathe of planets and places to go. We spent a lot of time developing down that road, and tailoring the story towards it and so forth, and we quickly found it wasn’t yielding the results we wanted.

You can make a giant procedural game, but we were finding that the giant procedural game wasn’t the narrative experience or the moment-to-moment experience we wanted players to have.

He continued to say that there are some procedurally generated bits in Andromeda’s universe, however, planets like “Eledin or Eos, those are handbuilt planets.”